


My Lords' Hound

by osprey_archer



Category: Silver Branch - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-26
Updated: 2012-07-26
Packaged: 2017-11-10 18:20:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/469259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Justin and Flavius ask Cullen where he got his silver branch. The answer is not what they expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Lords' Hound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/gifts).



> A thousand thanks to carmarthen for the beta!

The frost-limned leaves crunched beneath Justin’s feet as he crossed the fort. The cold came early in the north, and had pushed the Painted People back to their winter camps, though assuredly they would return come spring. But the wounded would be well by then, if it was in Justin’s power.

He pushed back the curtain before Flavius’s sleeping cell. Cullen lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, tapping the bells of his silver branch with a fingernail. Flavius listened, his eyes quite unfocused, and Justin paused in sudden concern.

But Flavius’s eyes lifted to Justin’s face, and his thin pain-drawn face brightened into a smile. “Here to poke at me again?” he asked, and his smile grew a little brighter as he talked. 

So the delirium had not come back, after all. Justin smiled back, more tentatively, and knelt by the bedside. "Of course," he said, gently pulling back the blanket to probe Flavius's spear-struck leg. 

Flavius drew in a breath and tilted his head back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Cullen’s bells rang softly, soothing, and Justin was glad of the sound to distract Flavius from his work.

It had been a bad wound, the shinbone broken and a lot of blood lost, but it was healing well, straight and strong. Justin was glad to see it, but he winced a little from what he must say next. “We will w-walk today,” he said.

Flavius lifted his head to look at Justin. “Why?” he asked.

“It’s a bad thing to lie too long in bed,” Justin explained. “So. Now that your leg will bear you, we must walk a little.”

A bleakness clouded Flavius’s eyes. But he made no complaint, only thrust back the native rug and pulled himself to sit, and shivered a little in the chill air. “Is the frost come yet?” he asked.

“It came while you were still lost in the fever,” Justin said.

“So I’ve missed the sloes then, and the year’s best hunting,” Flavius said, and for a moment his irrepressible cheerfulness dimmed, so that his hair was the only brightness in the close room.

Cullen’s bells rippled as he rolled gracefully to his feet. “Na, my lord, you haven’t missed the sloes,” he said, and drew from his checkered cloak a neckerchief spotted purple from the little frost-sweetened plums.

Flavius laughed with delight. “O best of hounds!” he said. "Did you kill a boar for me as well?" He held out his hands for the sloes; but Justin stayed his hands.

“Wait; let us walk before you eat,” he urged, and Flavius sighed and nodded. “Your leg heals well,” Justin added. “You’ll hunt again next year.”

“So. That makes good hearing,” Flavius said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and flung an arm around Justin’s shoulders, a swift companionable gesture that put Justin in mind of their first meeting.

But his face was not the laughing face of that young centurion. As Justin helped him rise, Flavius's thin face grew so pale that his drawn mouth seemed a knife gash in his skin. He took a short step and almost fell, his hand tightening painfully on Justin’s shoulder, and steadied himself. He gave a quick breathless laugh with no mirth behind it. “Let’s march, then,” he said.

It would have been a sorry centurion indeed who let his troops make such a poor showing on the parade ground. Flavius made no sound as they shuffled across the narrow sleeping cell, but there was a sickish twitching at the corners of his mouth, and Justin’s shoulder ached under the grip of Flavius’s hand. Behind them, Cullen rang his smallest, highest bell, again and again and again.

“Cullen,” said Flavius, his voice brittle but steady. “Could you play something else? More - distracting.”

“Aye,” said Cullen, and a silver waterfall sang from his bells.

The sound seemed to calm Flavius. When they reached the far wall he pressed his hand against it, drawing in a long breath, then slowly turned back toward the bed. He paused a moment, a breathing space before the walk back, and said, “Cullen. Where did you get the silver branch?”

“In Erin,” Cullen said simply.

“Did - “ Flavius took a sharp breath as they began to walk, and his voice grew very quiet. “Did Carausius give it to you?”

But Cullen did not seem to hear. He tilted the branch from side to side, tilting his head as he did, as if watching the music rush like water from one end to another; and his tail swayed with each tilt. He did not speak again, and Justin wished he would, to distract Flavius from his pain.

“I w-wondered if Carausius might have taken it off those Saxon ships,” Justin prompted. “For it is a rich thing for a slave and the son of a slave to have.”

But Cullen shook his head. “It was no gift of Curoi’s,” he said. “It was mine, before ever Curoi bought me.”

Flavius turned his sweat-sheened face to look at Cullen, eyes bright with interest. But he could not speak through teeth set against pain, so Justin asked, “Was it your first masters who gave it to you?”

“No,” said Cullen. He hesitated, seeming to squirm under Justin and Flavius’s interest, but just when Justin thought to apologize for prying, Cullen said, “It was the gift of the dark and dancing people.”

And that was so unexpected that Justin could not help but ask, “So it was the Little Dark People gave it to you?” 

“They say they’re - fond of bronze,” said Flavius.

“Na, na,” said Cullen. He shook the branch, so the bells rang like rain. “Not little people, but tall and very cold. They danced around the dancing oak, and gave me the silver branch after they took my wits away, because I sang so sweetly for them.”

There were a great many things in Justin’s heart to say, but they all crowded in his throat and he could not think which to speak. He had thought (if he thought on it at all) that Cullen’s hound-like eagerness to serve - not mere willingness, but eagerness, so unusual in a slave - had been born in him; and it seemed a horrible thing, a kind of crippling, that it had been done to him.

Perhaps Flavius felt it too, because the crease between his eyes seemed suddenly more curiosity and concern than pain. “Why did they take your wits away?” he asked.

“Because I sang so sweetly,” Cullen said again.

“That was poor repayment,” Flavius said.

But Cullen only gave a quicksilver shrug. “They could not have me telling where the dancing oak was. And withal, they gave me the silver branch; and without it, I would not have met Curoi.”

And then they reached the bed, and all chance of speaking was lost in helping Flavius lie down again. Cullen rose from his place on the floor with one of his kingfisher twists, and joined his arm with Justin’s to help ease Flavius to the bed, but even so Flavius fell as much as sat. And before Flavius was even settled, Cullen said, “I will fetch your supper, my lord, to eat with the sloes”; and he sprang to the door, and was gone.

Flavius closed his eyes. “I gathered sloes as a boy,” he said. “Volumnia scolded me for coming in covered in spots, but Aunt Honoria - it’s always a surprise how she’ll react to a thing - she laughed...” He cut himself off with a sharp breath as Justin helped left his wounded leg onto the bed. “I do not think I can eat,” he admitted.

“The pain will ease in a little,” said Justin. “And you must eat. Can we defeat the Painted People without you?”

“Assuredly no,” said Flavius. He settled the rug around himself, and said, “What think you of Cullen’s dancing dark people? What sort of people punish a man for singing well?”

“Some sort of mystery c-cult?” Justin suggested tentatively. “Tree worshippers, maybe. He might have disturbed their rites...” But how would a mystery cult take a man’s wits away?

Flavius seemed to mislike the explanation too, moving restlessly on the bed. “Then it’s lucky they did not kill him outright,” he said, kicking his rug with his good leg. “And how does a slave come to wander into the meeting of some wild wooded mystery cult?”

Justin only shook his head.

Some of the color had come back into Flavius’s face, and with it a shade of uncertainty. “Do you think he spoke the truth?”

Justin was surprised. “Of course,” he said. “I do not think Cullen lies.”

“Not to my remembering,” Flavius said. “It is only that I think he did not like us asking.”

“Yes,” agreed Justin; and he knew, as much as he wanted to know more of Cullen's story, that they could not ask again. “Yet there is the silver branch that must be explained; that is not the kind of thing a slave just happens on, either, and I am sure he did speak true when he said it was not the gift of Carausius.”

Flavius nodded, but the crease of uncertainty only deepened between his eyes. Like any other land Erin must have its secrets; and they might understand them no better for trying.

But then Cullen returned, bearing a bowl of pottage that still steamed when he unwrapped it from his coat, and Flavius found he could eat, after all, and stained his fingers with the sloes. Cullen took up his silver branch again and played, and Justin watched, wondering, wondering; and left to attend his wounded, wondering still.


End file.
